What is a virtual instrument?

May 26, 2004 17:13 Need free technical consultation? Free consultation hotline: 8008203622, or click "Please call NI engineers back!" to seek help from NI technical engineers immediately! Reasons for choosing virtual instrument technology/Why choose virtual instrument technology? Virtual instrument technology is a user-defined test and measurement solution based on PC technology. Its four major advantages are: high performance, strong scalability, less development time, and excellent performance. integrated functions. High-performance virtual instruments are developed on the basis of PC technology, so they completely "inherit" the advantages of the latest commercial technologies dominated by ready-to-use PC technology, including powerful processors and file I/O, making You can perform complex analysis in real time while data is imported to disk. With the continuous enhancement of data transmission to the hard drive and the integration with the PC bus, high-speed data recording has become less dependent on large-capacity local memory. Taking a 60G oscilloscope as an example, using virtual instrument technology, it is quite simple to build such an oscilloscope. As long as a PC-based digitizer is placed in the PC, it can achieve high resolution at up to 1 second. Import data to disk at 100MB speed. Another outstanding advantage of virtual instrument technology is the ever-increasing network bandwidth. Data sharing has entered a new stage with the Internet and faster and faster computer networks. By combining the Internet with NI's software and hardware products, you can easily share measurement results with colleagues on the other side of the world, and share "If the world is far away" "Nearby" convenience. Highly scalable NI's software and hardware tools enable engineers and scientists to no longer be locked into current technologies. Thanks to the flexibility of NI software, simply updating your computer or measurement hardware can improve your entire system with minimal hardware investment and minimal or no software upgrades. When taking advantage of the latest technologies, you can integrate them into existing measurement equipment, ultimately accelerating time to market at less cost. Less development time At both the driver and application levels, NI's efficient software architecture can be combined with the latest technologies in computers, instrumentation, and communications. NI designed this software architecture to facilitate user operation, while also providing flexibility and powerful functions, allowing you to easily configure, create, deploy, maintain and modify high-performance, low-cost measurement and control solutions . Perfectly integrated virtual instrument technology is essentially an integrated software and hardware concept. As products continue to become more functionally complex, engineers usually need to integrate multiple measurement devices to meet complete testing requirements. However, the connection and integration between these different devices always takes a lot of time and cannot be completed easily. NI's virtual instrument software platform provides standard interfaces for all I/O devices, such as data acquisition, vision, motion and distributed I/O, etc., helping users easily integrate multiple measurement devices into a single system, reducing the complexity of the task. For maximum performance, simple development and system-level coordination, these different devices must maintain their independence while also being tightly integrated. NI's architecture allows developers to quickly create test systems and easily modify the systems as requirements change. Thanks to the benefits of this integrated architecture, your system can be more competitive because you can design and test high-quality products more efficiently and get them to market faster. Other unique features of NI products: Variety of products to choose from: With all the measurement software and hardware tools currently on the market, engineers spend a lot of time learning how to use them, so it is critical to take the time to choose the right tool. . NI provides you with a full range of test and measurement hardware products, ranging from data acquisition, signal conditioning, sound and vibration measurement, vision, motion, instrument control, distributed I/O to CAN interface and other industrial communications. Whether you want to start a new project or enter a new field, the easy-to-use, user-friendly virtual instrument software can bring you seamless integration with hardware devices, combined with NI's test and measurement tools, to help you solve application problems. actual needs. Because time is money, NI's tools can protect your time investment and help you become a more efficient engineer. Industry standards and long-term compatibility Measuring and automation systems created according to industry standards enable you to save development and maintenance costs now and even in the future. NI knows that this is crucial to users, and we are actively participating in and promoting the development of open industry standards. NI is committed to providing the most advanced technology while ensuring system compatibility with previous versions, so engineers and scientists can continue to use the same solution for an extended period of time. To achieve this long-term solution, NI provides a software architecture that includes standard application programming interfaces (APIs) to ensure compatibility and scalability as computers, networks, and operating systems continue to improve. . Global Service and Technical Support NI has branches in more than 40 countries to provide service and technical support to users around the world. The professional service team composed of NI China and system alliance partners is dedicated to working with you to design the best solution for your unique application needs. NI application engineers can also provide comprehensive after-sales technical support via phone, email and the Chinese website at ni.com/china. ->Download the "Virtual Instrument White Paper" Note: After downloading, you need to use Adobe Acrobat Reader (4.0 or higher) to browse. If you need a free evaluation version of the software or a printed version of the article, please leave a message on the guestbook to request it, and NI will mail it as soon as possible. To you. Free consultation hotline: 800 820 3622, Email: china.info@ni.com, Tel: 021-6555 7838, Fax: 021-6555 6244. More contact information